Accounting for religion
From Wikinfo
See also religion and modern causes for hostility to religion
All religions explain the reasons for their existence in their own terms, but modern scholarship has brought new tools to the task of accounting for the phenomenon of religious belief, in naturalistic terms. Especially in the fields of neurology, neuropsychology, memetics and evolutionary psychology, new breakthroughs offer a hope of explaining religion in scientific terms. Although some would argue that the scientific point of view is simply one more belief system, and therefore no more valid than a religious world view.
Why do religious views dominate so many diverse cultures that have had very little or no contact? Why is some form of religion found in almost every human group? Why do humans often accept counterfactual statements in the name of religion? In neurology, work by scientists such as Ramachandran and his colleagues from the University of California, San Diego [1] suggests that they have found evidence of brain circuitry in the temporal lobe that gives rises to intense religious experiences. In sociology, Rodney Stark has looked at the social forces that have caused religions to grow and the features of religions that have been most successful. For example, Stark, who claims to be an agnostic, hypothesizes that, before Christianity became established as the state religion of Constantinople, Christianity grew rapidly because it provided a practical framework within which non-family members would provide help to other people in the community in a barter system of mutual assistance. [2] In evolutionary psychology, scientists have considered the survival advantages that religion might have given to a community of hunter-gatherers, such as unifying them with in a coherent social group.
Some cognitive psychologists, however, take a completely different approach to explaining religion. Foremost among them is Pascal Boyer, whose book, Religion Explained, lays out the basics of his theory, and attempts to refute several previous and more simple explanations for the phenomenon of religion. Essentially, Mr. Boyer claims that religion is a result of the misfunctioning or overfunctioning of certain subconscious intuitive mental faculties, which normally apply to physics (enabling prediction of the arc a football will take only seconds after its release, for example), and social networks (to keep track of other people's identity, history, loyalty, etc.), and a variety of others.
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Religion" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
